Given the number of guides to gaming Digg and Netscape, how long before everyone realizes that the systems aren’t functioning as designed?

Additionally, this week I’ve heard a number of comments from teens that lead me to believe that they aren’t as big a part of the ’social media’ boom as we’d like to think.

They’re ‘connected’, but to each other, with cell phones, and the Web is sometimes viewed as a necessary evil. So two years from now will we be talking about the ‘cell phone media’ boom?

To me, the email function in Digg is key and is really and truly valuable. Digg grows its community and the stories go viral – beyond Digg. It’s extremely powerful.

I can’t begin to list the amount of websites and stories that I have visited that I would NEVER have found through search; “little-guy” sites and blogs with strong, relevant and interesting content. To boot – I forwarded that information on to 8 friends outside of the Digg community!

But for most everything else Chris hit the nail on the head when he said “leveraged properly”. Quick traffic is one thing, keeping those visitors around or coming back, quite another.

Is Social Media Worthless?

Short answer: NO WAY. To me it is very, very valuable when leveraged properly. Both long term and short..

(did anyone else notice the references to Kim as a guy in the comments?)

Well, yes! I did That was when I realized nobody was reading MY blog or MY archives, or visiting MY other websites, all of which are clearly labeled on my blog. Nor did they visit my bio or About pages, where my picture is.

And when I did leave a comment to the Digg commenters, they STILL didn’t figure it out, LOL. That 28,000 was in the first 14 hours of being dugg, btw. Sure-fire way to give me a heart attack is to see traffic like that show up when you don’t expect it.

What i did is spend the time hitting all the social sites and getting involved.

I found that after a front page story i would receive an almost doubled normal daily traffic for about 3 to 4 days after the main hits of the initial front page day.

After the week i would see a significat increase in my daily visitor count.

So when i first started i was happy to get about 300 a day on the site and after the first digg and other social front page articles i found an increase to about 500 a day in traffic.. Since then about a month later i now have a minimum of no less than 1000 visits on my worst day and about 4000 to 6000 on a decent day without any front page articles.

I have also seen the amount of quality inbound links i have received from the articles. I receive about 3 times as many links inbound to the site after a front page article than i do normal days.

I think the point is that the traffic on Digg or another social site is no differant in my opinion than the same traffic you get from search engines. The only differance is that they are not quite as defined in their visiting purpose.

But if you increase your incoming visit count by 10 times your normal those people are the same people that would normally link to you and repost your article anyhow. They just come in a much higher number.

So to think that having those people come through your site would not result in a positive outcome is rediculous.

If your site is crap and you have no content then you will not have the outcome that you desire just because you used a social network for traffic.

Just as if you did this with a search engine it is still your responsibility to provide something for your visitors to want to return or purchase in order to succeed.

Sorry i kinda went off on that.. prolly my longest comment on a blog ever.